As a result of less-than-satisfactory water quality in many cities in the United States (and elsewhere), individuals often purchase bottled drinking water that comes from a variety of different sources. Often, such customers buy spring water that is bottled in five gallon plastic containers and mounted on dispensing units in offices and homes, whereby the water in the bottles can be disposed into cups or the like that are placed under the spigot of the dispensing unit (water cooler).
Since a customer has to lift the filled water bottle and invert it onto the water cooler, the bottle itself must be manageable in terms of its weight and configuration. It has been found that the five gallon size of water bottle is preferred, if not mandated. Not counting the weight of the bottle itself, the water within a filled five gallon container weight approximately forty-four pounds—not an insubstantial amount to lift and guide into the top opening of a water cooler. For this reason, the water bottle itself is formed of a lightweight plastic and comprises a relatively thin-walled configuration (so that the bottle itself has a minimal weight, on the order of only a few pounds).
Due to the thin wall of the plastic bottles, coupled with the weight of the water, these bottles are somewhat fragile and must be handled with care to avoid rupturing the bottles and/or disturbing the seal of the cap. This fragility poses even more significant problems within the bottling and distribution aspects of the commercial water business.
Indeed, the delivery process for such bottle water typically involves filling the plastic bottles with spring water (or the like), capping the bottles with plastic caps, and loading the filled and capped bottles onto shipping racks for delivery to customers. FIG. 1 is a side view of an exemplary prior art “five high” rack 10 including a plurality of support rails 12-1, 12-2, . . . , 12-5 for supporting bottles in a plurality of five rows 14-1, 14-2, . . . , 14-5. As shown, prior art rack 10 is “two deep”, meaning that the depth D of rack 10 is sized to accommodate two water bottles. In such a two-deep rack, the bottles may be unloaded from either side to efficiently remove the water at its destination. FIG. 2 is a front view of rack 10, with one water bottle removed to illustrate an exemplary support rail 12. In this exemplary embodiment, rack 10 is shown as having three separate columns 16-1, 16-2 and 16-3.
It is to be understood that the array size of any such rack is matter of design and convenience. Indeed, FIG. 3 is a side view of an alternative prior art rack 20, in this case for supporting smaller (e.g., three gallon) bottles, where prior art rack 20 is formed to include a plurality of rails 22-1, 22-2 and 22-3 in a plurality of three rows 24-1, 24-2 and 24-3. In this embodiment for supporting smaller bottles, rack 20 is formed to comprise a depth d sufficient to support a “three deep” arrangement (i.e., three water bottles supported on each rail 22). FIG. 4 is a front view of prior art rack 20, showing in this embodiment three columns 26-1, 26-2 and 26-3 being used to define the rack structure. Both racks 10 and 20 are formed to include spaced-apart tunnels 11 and 21, respectively, to allow for the rack to be lifted and moved by a fork lift (not shown).
Small bottled water producers often load racks such as those shown in FIGS. 1-4 by hand, with a crew receiving the filled bottles from a filling line, lifting the bottles and guiding them into the various compartments within the rack structure. At times, the bottles must be pushed toward the rear of the rack (e.g., when loading “two deep” or “three deep”). When the racks have compartments “four high” or “five high”, the crew must lift the filled bottle (weighing over forty pounds) over four feet in the air to place them in the racks. Such manual loading requires considerable physical exertion to load a single rack structure containing, for example, twenty-four or more bottles. Since the bottles are somewhat fragile, the crew must not “bang” the bottles against the rack or its rails, or the bottles could rupture or the seal caps be compromised.
Obviously, the labor-intensive manual loading of these bottles in racks places the crew at risk for injuries associated with the difficult and repetitive lifting involved. Larger bottled water producers have therefore resorted to large machines for automatically loading water-filled bottles into shipping racks, some machines costing upwards of a million dollars. Further, these machines often consume significant floor space and require high vertical clearances of two stories or more. Machines of this type are disclosed and described in detail in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,929,140 issued to Baker, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,244,330 issued to Tonjes.
Thus, a need remains in the art for an automated arrangement for loading filled bottles into a rack structure that is less expensive and more compact than the arrangements available in the prior art, allowing for small bottled water companies to utilize an automated system.